There has been a desire on the part of appliance manufacturers to develop a one-piece door construction in appliances such as ranges and microwave ovens to reduce fabrication costs. Gaskets would have to be attached to such doors from an exterior side using some type of mechanical fastening.
One approach for mechanically mounting such gaskets to one-piece doors is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,822,060. A flexible, hollow cylindrical gasket with clip-type fasteners protruding along one side thereof is formed from a hollow, tubular, knitted wire core and braided, glass fiber yarn outer jacket. A single wire member is bent at several locations along its length to form a series of connected engagement portions that are inserted through both the core and jacket to form the “clips” of the gasket.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,107,623 describes another type of gasket construction with the same an elongated core and woven outer jacket but with a plurality of separate, individual fasteners spaced along the device. Each fastener has a base captured between the core and the woven outer jacket and an engagement portion extending away from the base and through the adjoining portion of the woven outer jacket. The individual fasteners are connected to one another in the device only through capture of each fastener by the core and outer jacket.
Termination of either type of gasket is currently relatively unattractive. The ends of the gasket are simply brought together and overlapped in some fashion, and fixed together with a suitable fastener such as a staple. Unless the appliance manufacturer can hide the joint thus formed in some way, for example, by covering it with part of a door panel, it will remain visible on the oven door where the exposed gasket end(s) will eventually begin to fray.